The Mom Test, six months later: a note template you can still use

Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test fixed how a generation of founders ask questions: talk about their life, not your idea; ask about the past, not the future; dig for specifics. It says much less about what to do with the answers after the call, and that is where I see most of the value leak away.

A good interview produces maybe five sentences that matter. If those five are stored as “they liked the idea, want integrations, price seemed fine”, the interview is gone. Here is the note format that keeps them.

The template

Copy this into whatever you use. Plain text is fine.

SOURCE
Who:        Maria, owner, Bella Hair Studio
Party:      customer          (customer | prospect | internal | expert)
Date:       2026-06-10
Channel:    quarterly review call
Context:    renewal in two months, three locations

VERBATIMS   (exact words, their language, one per line, in quotes)
- “We really need reminders by text message, email alone does not reach our younger clients.”
- “The Friday payout hits after the weekend rush, so I am covering wages from my own account.”
- “If a client books it should just appear in my Google Calendar.”

FACTS       (numbers and dates they gave)
- Email reminders roughly halved no-shows since March
- Three staff, about 60 bookings a week

MY READ     (labelled as mine, kept apart from theirs)
- SMS reminders is the second time this month, likely a theme
- Payout timing is a cash-flow problem, not a feature request

FOLLOW-UPS
- Send the calendar sync beta invite

The five rules behind it

Verbatims in quotation marks, in their language. The quotation marks are not decoration. They are a promise to your future self that these are the customer's words and not your reconstruction. If they spoke Dutch, the quote stays Dutch; translating is interpreting.

Party before everything. A prospect's “must-have” and a customer's “must-have” are different animals. Write which one it was on every source, not once per project. Six months on you will filter by it constantly.

Facts separate from quotes. “Halved no-shows since March” is a number you will want in a deck. Keep it findable on its own line rather than buried in a paragraph.

Your read is labelled as yours. Interpretation is useful and you should write it down. It just has to be impossible to mistake for evidence later. A heading is enough.

One source, many insights. A single call produces several unrelated points. Do not merge them into a summary sentence. Each verbatim is its own insight and will be retrieved on its own.

The failure mode to watch for

After about the twentieth interview, the template quietly degrades. Verbatims become paraphrases because typing the exact sentence is slower. Party goes missing because “I will remember”. My read starts appearing inside the quotes section.

That is not a discipline problem. It is a cost problem: the template asks for structure at the moment of capture, and structure is expensive when you are busy. The fix is to move the structure out of the human's way.

How Crossroad automates the template

This is the part I built, so take it as such. Crossroad takes the raw text of a conversation, a pasted transcript, a selected paragraph, a forwarded email or a dropped file, and produces exactly the structure above without asking for it:

• Each source gets a party, an account, a date and a channel.
• Each insight gets a type (feature request, pain point, data point, quote, observation, question), a summary, topics, and the verbatim it came from.
• Every verbatim is checked to be an exact span of the source text. If the model cannot point at the sentence, the insight does not get a quote.
• Summaries and topics are written in the workspace language, Dutch or English, while quotes stay in whatever language they were said.

And then the part the template cannot do on paper: you ask “what have we heard about reminders?” and get the answer with each claim cited back to the quote and the call.

If you would rather stay in a document, take the template. It is the whole method. If you would rather not type the structure twenty times, try the demo.